Cancun Climate Agreements Take Baby Steps

The latest iteration of climate talks came to a close in
Cancun on Friday (Dec. 9) with some small steps forward, but without a binding
treaty and no strengthened pledges to reduce greenhouse gases.

"Certainly, relative to expectations it was a very big
success. Compared to what needs to be accomplished it falls woefully
short," Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress,
and editor of ClimateProgress.org, told LiveScience. "The situation is
quite dire, and the science has gotten considerably more solid and alarming in
the last year or two."

Talks in Copenhagen a year ago failed to produce a binding
treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which, in 1997, required industrialized
countries to reduce their emissions an average of five percent. (The U.S. never
signed on.) As a result of this disappointment, expectations for Cancun were modest.
[The
Basics of the Cancun Climate Talks]

Two important accomplishments in Cancun included progress in
creating a fund to assist developing countries and incentives to prevent
deforestation, Romm said.

The Cancun Agreements also continued talks to extend the
Kyoto Protocol, whose commitment period expires in 2012, and they quantified greenhouse
gas reduction pledges made in Copenhagen.

However, these pledges provide only 60 percent of the
greenhouse gas reductions needed to cap warming of the Earth's average surface
temperature at
less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to estimates in a report
by the United Nations Environment Program.

"There is nothing in the agreements I have seen changes
the size of the gap as it was estimated in the UNEP report," said Beth
Sawin, one of the lead authors of the report, and co-director of the
nongovernmental organization, Climate Interactive.

The report calculates that, to keep
global warming below this threshold, global emissions will most likely need to
peak before 2020, and without an agreement from Cancun that includes stronger
reductions, the world comes a year closer to that threshold.

You can follow LiveScience
writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry.

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Author Bio

Wynne Parry

Wynne was a reporter at The Stamford Advocate. She has interned at Discover magazine and has freelanced for The New York Times and Scientific American's web site. She has a masters in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Utah.